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Decentralised Wastewater Treatment

A way to manage septage in Shimla CSE has submitted a report on septage management in Shimla as a part of its deliverable as Centre of Excellence in the area of Water Management under Ministry of Urban Development. Shimla city, being highly undulating encounter problems in laying conventional, gravity flow sewer lines that will connect each and every house in all residential areas.

A monsoon warning

As I write this my city Delhi is drowning. It started raining early this morning and within a few hours the city has come to a standstill. The television is showing scenes of traffic snarled up for hours, roads waterlogged and people and vehicles sunk deep in water and muck. The meteorological department records that some 60 mm of rain has fallen in just about 6 hours; 90 mm in 24 hours; and with this the city has made up for its deficit of rainfall this season. In other words, in just about 24 hours Delhi and its surrounding areas got half as much rain as they would in the entire month of September. Delhi, like all growing cities of India, is mindless about drainage. Storm water drains are either clogged or do not exist. Our lakes and ponds have been eaten away by real estate. Land is what the city values, not water. So when it rains more than it should the city drowns.

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High risk

Problem: Tall buildings risky in high seismic zones; Status: Hill-stations are getting concretised and growing vertically; Challenge: Use local construction material; regulate traffic

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Let there be CFL

When the kerosene supply went down sharply in Nagpur four years ago, Bharat Parihar's business of renting out Petromax lamps to vegetable vendors began to look fragile.

World Environment Day: Old play, new actors.

It began like every other year. I am talking about the frenzied activities that usually take place in various parts of the world in the last week of May. This year too, Mission Cleanup was on in full swing to give our grimy planet that fake spruced-up look on 5 June, when the global community celebrates ‘World Environment Day’.

CFL is a leapfrog option for India as it increases efficiency, but the lack of regulations is jeopardising the programme

New Delhi, February 4, 2009: The burgeoning compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) sector in India is faced with some key concerns, and the most critical of them is the problem of disposal of mercury used in CFLs: this was the consensus at a Round Table meeting on the sector, organised here today by the New Delhi-based research and advocacy organisation, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE).